Quiz Night answers

First, last night:

-Mastermind specialist subjects:

• The playing career of Sunil Gavaskar
• The Hunger Games
• Leonard Bernstein
• Edvard Munch

-Only Connect from the Sequences round - what comes next?

North: Air - East: Kisser - South: Dumps - ?

Now for the answers you all have been waiting for...

Connections round:

• 14
• 39
• 50
• 55

Answer: The start years of 20th century wars:

1914 WW1

1939 WW2

1950 Korean War

1955 Vietnam War

The connecting wall round gives you 16 words and you have to group them correctly in four groups of four. Example:

• maroon, volume, horse, desert
• count, vanilla, strand, weight
• dump, chocolate, age, standard
• measure, matter, plain, normal

Answer:

(Taken from yesterday's NYTimes app, which is similar)

That's it for quizzing for a while, you'll be pleased to know!

Not my kind of movie

Teenage girly, musicals, three hours long. All no-nos for me in choosing a film to watch. So why I watched Wicked is a mystery. But I’m glad I did, it is very entertaining. It’s a prequel to the Wizard of Oz and contains much that is familiar from the land of Oz, such as talking animals - Peter Dinklage speaks for the history teacher goat. This is not incidental - a rebellion occurs in support of the animals after the school decides to terminate their services.

I've never understood why the Wizard is central to the title of the book and the earlier movie. He's just a fake with no magic powers; it's the witches which are the central characters - the good one and the wicked one. 

The show begins with a spoiler - Galinda (Ariana Grande) announces to the audience that "the Wicked Witch of the West is dead". Here's where I have to confess to a large degree of ignorance about female pop singers. If you played me a song by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Rihanna or even Madonna I wouldn't know which is which. In my ignorance I dismiss them as under-dressed popular artists pandering to a teenage girl audience making appealing but limited music [Ed: patronising old git].

But I stand corrected. Ariana Grande can actually sing. Startlingly well, with a huge vocal range. A little bit lacking in oomph but then I'm comparing her to operatic sopranos that I'm more familiar with and who probably possess larger lung capacities. After listening to her I read some stuff about her and learn she has a vocal range of at least four octaves and she can use the whistle register (the highest soprano frequencies). She is joined by co-star Cynthia Erivo. I'm aware of her from a weird and scary Stephen King adaptation The Outsider, where she plays a savant-like private detective and steals the show. I didn't know she was a singer but this is my loss because she has won an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony award as well as having an Oscar nomination.

These two make the central focus of the film. Initially from wildly different backgrounds - Erivo as Elphaba, the sister of wheelchair-bound Nessarose who is due to enrol in Shiz University and the Dean of Sorcery Studies sees an accidental magic trick by Elphaba and enrols her too. Elphaba has green skin and now that she needs a room she is paired with bubbly blonde Galinda (who becomes Glinda for no apparent reason). Popular Glinda grates on reclusive Elphaba but, in true romcom tradition, they eventually become best buddies, even though they both rather fancy connecting with the same classic all-American boy. Elphaba is enraged by the sacking of the animals who teach in the university and decides she needs to go see the Wizard in the hope that he will change the situation. She and Glinda board a spectacular life sized train and go to Oz. The Wizard proves to be useless and Elphie flies off into the distance on a broomstick leaving Glinda pretty baffled by what's going on.

I tried to get the essential points, as I understand them, in that synopsis. Much that is enjoyable revolves around the outstanding visual production and the strength of the musical and dance numbers; the storyline is pretty incidental.

This is where the film ends, but obviously not the story.

The only real issue for me is it’s a stretch at nearly 3 hours, despite being only the first half of the movie adaptation of the stage musical (I watched it over two evenings). The second half - Wicked: For Good (I'm so glad they didn't lazily go for Wicked 2) - comes to the cinema in November. I'll be there, queuing with the teenage girls.

Quiz Night

I love quizzes. To be fair, you wouldn't want me on your pub quiz team because I know next to nothing about the staple diet of those - popular music, soap operas, celebrities. Although there's always a bit of sport where I might be able to contribute. 

But Monday night is Quiz Night on BBC2. Mastermind at 7:30 followed by Only Connect and finally University Challenge.

When I was a teacher at Chetham's School, as Head of Sixth Form I organised a team to compete in the Manchester Schools' Challenge. I got my good friend who was the physics teacher to build the electronics required to enable the buzzers and we had a lot of fun. I don't think we won anything (musicians don't know much about normal life) and one of the teaching staff, a dour Scottish Presbyterian, denounced us as "prostituting our knowledge", which I found difficult to answer because (a) I was shocked and (b) I didn't know what that meant.

At home when the kids got older, University Challenge was a regular watch (it's been going for over 60 years, only one year less than Coronation Street) and involved a cushion.

Anyway, back to tonight's quizzes. Mastermind is my least favourite because half of the questions are unanswerable except in very specific circumstances, i.e. you actually need to know something about the specialist subjects chosen. Here are those from the most recent three episodes:

• Stage plays of Sir Tom Stoppard
• The music of Led Zeppelin
• Penguins
• The Empire State Building 
• The Glorious Revolution
• The career of Novak Djokovic 
• Caravaggio
• Premier League Darts
• Inside No. 9
• Grace Hopper

See what I mean? Esoteric doesn't come close. The contestants also answer a general knowledge round, which starts with a very easy question and gets progressively harder. Which is OK for me as I'll get a few. Of course for the contestants it's much more difficult because there is clock pressure.

Then there's Only Connect, probably the most difficult quiz show around. You have to work out the link between four apparently unrelated clues (or sometimes three and you have to guess what's coming next). Pure inductive reasoning, of the type used for solving cryptic crossword clues. They're often deliberately misleading. Try this:

• 14
• 39
• 50
• 55

The connecting wall round gives you 16 words and you have to group them correctly in four groups of four. Example:

• maroon, volume, horse, desert
• count, vanilla, strand, weight
• dump, chocolate, age, standard
• measure, matter, plain, normal

It's fiendishly difficult (contestants are on the clock too) but fascinates me. Answers tomorrow!

Finally, University Challenge is basically a pub quiz for nerds. I guess that's me. 

I'm the archetypal couch potato.

I'm really sorry...

...to all my readers who couldn't give a monkey's about football. But...

Here we go, the new football season has started. The last kick of a football of any consequence was on 27th July in Basel, when Chloe Kelly scored the winning penalty against Spain to win the women's Euros 2025. Great joy in the Whitstable household. Since then just...dreary summer. But this weekend we're back.

Ipswich Town started their promotion challenge on Friday with a very lucky 95th minute equaliser against newcomers (but for me predicted challengers) Birmingham City. Exactly the same minute in which Charlton Athletic got a deserved winner in their Championship debut the following day. We can't wait for the big match between the two on April 22nd at the Valley.

Yesterday title-chasing Arsenal won their final pre-season friendly at the Emirates, showing off their new signings. There are apparently other teams involved in all these competitions but you shouldn't expect me to refer to them too often. At the other end of the scale (no offence), Whitstable Town begin the defence of their FA Vase title on 8th November.

So much to look forward to....roll on those dark winter nights.

If you want me to feature your team this season, post a comment below.

It's August

You know it's slow-news-time August when croquet appears in a half page spread in the Times. The deck [technical term - look it up] says "The game has taken a mallet to its aristocratic image to make a global impact". What a load of guff; I played croquet for many years and the total number of aristocrats I encountered was precisely zero. Why do they have to be so ignorant and patronising? It's an elite sport, of course - only super clever people can even understand it let alone play it. When have you ever met a clever aristocrat?

To be fair, the article talks about the growth of the game in Hong Kong, Mexico and Estonia - it's always had an Anglocentric base (including the Americans although typically they play their own rules) so maybe it's us croquet players who are the patronising ones, surprised that third world countries can embrace it. I have played croquet in almost as many countries as I have visited racecourses but my score in Hong Kong is currently Racecourse 1 croquet 0.

The August haul of important news includes the Cornish Seaweed Company ("spaghetti seaweed" is a gluten-free pasta alternative), a Labour MP has created a chatbot so that he doesn't need to bother with a face to face surgery, Wallace and Gromit are back with MasterChef and Italy is planning to build the world's longest suspension bridge to connect Sicily to the mainland. The distance is 2 miles. The shortest distance between the Scilly Isles and the Cornish mainland is 25 miles. We should go for it! Boris would do it, but I hear he's holidaying in Sicily.

Just don't expect daily blog posts in August. Although you could always write your own contribution.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt?

I watched an ITV documentary: Lucy Letby; Beyond Reasonable Doubt? It’s an analysis of the evidence used to prosecute the NHS neo-natal nurse for the murder of seven newborn babies and the attempted murder of eight more. She is serving 15 concurrent whole life sentences.

It's very disturbing for a number of reasons. It's told from the perspective of Letby's latest barrister, Mark McDonald and appears to be part of his strategy to draw attention to her defence case and to his application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. There is no pretence of balance but maybe that's not the intention of the programme; it's trying to balance what is suggested was an unbalanced prosecution.

The current problem is that the Criminal Cases Review Commission can only review a case if new evidence has come to light. McDonald's case is built on the (unstated but inferred) assertion that the defence team in the cases was at best incompetent, failing to call expert witnesses whose testimony would have contradicted the state's expert witnesses. Indeed they called only one witness in her defence, a plumber testifying to sewage issues. Further, evidence of two of the state's main witnesses now having rowed back on their statements is presented, which I guess you could argue is "new" evidence.

McDonald assembled a team of "world-renowned" (and to me, a lay person, convincing) experts who produced a substantial report which essentially claims the convictions were based on circumstantial ("she must have done this because she was around at the time") evidence and misleading medical and statistical claims and are therefore unsafe.

It's a powerful case but I found myself wondering how I, if I were on the jury, could make sense of the medical data as presented. If there were no alternative opinions presented by the defence, I would have to believe the doctors, wouldn't I? As a person with both a brain and a sceptical bent, I'd have liked to question some of the evidence but that isn't the role of a juror. Is a lay jury really the best way of deciding such a case? It it were a civil case and you were required to make a judgment on the balance of probabilities, perhaps. But I can't see how twelve lay persons, as "good and true" as they may be, can judge a prosecution's case proven beyond reasonable doubt in cases where medical evidence is the primary basis of the case. Section 43 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 provides for a trial without a jury in serious fraud cases if "It would be too burdensome or unfair to expect a jury to follow the evidence." Are medical cases not similar?

There's more to this programme than I've written here but I came away feeling that there are questions that need to be answered and, if our justice system in the form of the CCRC is more concerned with following its rules rather than searching for truth and offering Lucy Letby a fair hearing, I don't like it at all.